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We’re getting great feedback from audiences attending The Energy Show, which is currently on tour around England and Wales.

We’ve had one fantastic review in particular from seven year old Anna Sherriff that we’d love to share with you. Anna writes:

The Energy Show was fun and exciting with lots of humour and giving a lot of fact as well. Personally I think there could be no improvement at all!

The show was about two scientists doing lots of fun experiments, with i-nstein helping them and explaining some difficult words to the audience. The best bit was the scientists setting fire to the hydrogen and oxygen balloons which went off with loud bangs.

I would recommend The Energy Show because it’s funny, does really cool stuff, and all the people who went with me had a brilliant time too!

Review by Anna Sherriff, aged 7

Annabella, Phil and Bernard make science fun for families in The Energy Show. Photo: Benjamin Ealovega

If you’ve seen The Energy Show too and would like to offer feedback please email marketing@sciencemuseum.ac.uk or write to Marketing, Science Museum, Exhibition Road, South Kensington, SW7 2DD. The Energy Show is on tour throughout England and Wales over the next few months and returns to the Science Museum from 22 July – 3 August. Find dates and locations here.

X&Y, a new play that asks big questions about the universe, opens next week at the Science Museum before transferring to the Manchester Science Festival later this month. We spoke to Dermot Keaney, X&Y’s Co-Creator and Director.

I am a co-creator and the director of X&Y. My role is to help Marcus du Sautoy and Victoria Gould, the actors in the show, tell their amazing story and create a play that will be enjoyed by audience of all ages and backgrounds. You don’t have to be a ‘maths geek’ to enjoy this, you just have to be a ‘story geek’ and I believe that we are all one of those.

I’ve been acting professionally for 20 years but I’m doing more and more directing these days. I love to tell stories and hope that X&Y will be the first of many collaborations with the Science Museum. It’s great to get to work with incredibly bright people every day and be part of a team that is creating something, truly unique and magical.

Working at the Science Museum is incredibly inspiring because everywhere you look you see the evidence of genius, creativity and discovery. One feels the presence of giants all around.

My favourite object at the Museum has to be Stephenson’s Rocket. I remember seeing it for the first time as a 9-year-old and understanding how important this object was in the history of invention. I say hello to it every time I walk past. The Apollo 10 Command Module runs a close second.

Stephenson’s Rocket locomotive, 1829

The most memorable show I have worked on would have to be as an actor when I played Maccus, the hammerhead shark-man in Pirates of the Caribbean. The sheer scale of the production was breath-taking and to be part of animation history is very satisfying. I also had my character made into an action figure, which was cool!

Our summer spectacular, The Energy Show, is staged in a steampunk world which blends the past and the future. Much inspiration for the show was taken from the Science Museum’s collection, especially the machines of The Energy Hall. Ben Russell, Curator of Mechanical Engineering, talks here about some of our ‘steampunk’ objects in the Museum.

Beam engine by Benjamin Hick, 1840. Inv 1935-513

Photo: Science Museum / SSPL

Modern technology values function over anything else. Things are stripped down and smooth in appearance. Steampunk is a welcome kickback against this minimalist modern world we live in, reasserting the importance of form against function – and we can find this delicate balancing act played out in our collections.

Take this beam engine, for example. It’s a model of a full-size engine built in 1840 by Benjamin Hick of Bolton for a Leeds flax mill. It was an immense building, possibly the largest single room in the world. To animate the machines inside, Hick’s engine was certainly powerful, but in building it he gave full reign to his imagination. The result was an Egyptian engine: It has columns with papyrus-headed capitals, a mighty entablature inspired by a temple overlooking the River Nile, and the ‘chronometric’ governor to control the engine’s speed takes the form of a scarab beetle.

Photo: Science Museum / SSPL

Later Victorian design became rather bulbous, even grotesque, in appearance. But Hick’s engine is a sinuous masterpiece of epic design and brute strength. It reminds us not only of our creative debt to bewhiskered, roaring, big-jawed machine-makers like Hick, but also the significance of amazing nineteenth century machines, not just as a means to the end of production, but as symbolising national affluence and virility. In our present situation, it’s a lesson worth remembering: if you mean business, build machines that shout it out to the world.

Cooke and Wheatstone two-needle telegraph, 1851, Inv 1884-95

Photo: Science Museum / SSPL

A recurring theme in Steampunk is the application of nineteenth-century design ideas to modern digital technology: laptops, PCs, even memory sticks can be made antique with brass gearwheels, dials and mahogany cases.

Colliding state of the art technology with the Gothic isn’t just a recent thing, though. In 1837, William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented the world’s first successful telegraph system. It was mainly used on Britain’s evolving railway system, conveying messages via wires running alongside the tracks. A slightly lesser-known use of this pioneering system was to convey messages and reports across London, from the Houses of Parliament at Westminster to clubs in St James’s.

The Electric Telegraph Company was formed in 1846 and this instrument was installed at the Houses of Parliament in 1851. As a ‘black box’ of purely functional appearance, it would have jarred badly against the Gothic Revival style adopted in the newly rebuilt Palace of Westminster. So, the telegraph was fitted with its admirable Gothic casing, complete with pointed arch, finial, and delicately-realised columns. It must surely have lent a feeling of permanence and robustness to the room that it graced, reflecting the standing of Parliament – and also pre-empting one of the major pillars of steampunk.

Model of the side-lever engines of the Paddle Ship ‘Dee’, 1832. Inv 1900-41

Photo: Science Museum / SSPL

The problem with modern technology is that so much of it is intangible, digital, virtual, ephemeral. This point of view certainly underpins many Steampunk projects.

It wasn’t always like this, of course: introducing steam power to ships during the nineteenth was the cutting edge of serious heavy metal technology, and was a highly demanding field to design machines for: engines couldn’t be too heavy, they had to have a low centre of gravity, they couldn’t take up too much space.

These prerequisites offered valuable motivation to innovate in engineering design styles. Rather than big, heavy, monolithic construction and great slab-sided machines, engineers evolved lighter cast-iron structures, with lots of space, openings, and details which could be embellished without adding too much weight. Gothic engines? Check.

This model was built in 1832 for the Paddle Ship ‘Dee’ by the London company Maudslay, Sons and Field. Maudslay was a prolific model-maker, trying out new ideas before committing to them full-size, and this model is one of the finest surviving. The delicate cast iron Gothic tracery of its framing would not look out of place in a cathedral – a very tangible record of the creative impulses afforded to engineering, and perhaps inspiration for those Steampunkers looking for something a little out of the ordinary.

One of the main characters in The Energy Show is lab assistant i-nstein. Nina Dunn, responsible for Video Design and Animation Direction, and Mike Wyatt from Attack Animation were the masterminds behind bringing i-nstein to life. Take a look at their process here.

Design:We started off with a few rough pencil sketches. Then some orthographic representations of the sketches were created in Photoshop. Extra detail was added into the basic form to add interest.

3D Model:Using a 3D computer program such as ‘Maya’, the orthographic illustrations are used as reference to build i-nstein as a 3D polygonal model. The pink dots in the middle image are the vertices of the model. A ‘vertex’ is a point in 3D space. The blue lines are the ‘edges’ of the polygons, they are drawn between two vertices. A ‘face’ can be rendered between at least three vertices. It is best to use 4 vertices for each face, so the polygon which is drawn has 4 vertices and 4 edges draw between these vertices. We call these polygons ‘quads.’

Rigging:The next stage is called ‘rigging.’ This is where the puppet strings are built into the geometric model. The individual elements such as the eyebrows, the moustache, and the goggles are ‘skinned’ to curves and joints, before being placed under the influence of ‘controller curves.’ It is then possible to ‘pose’ each element of the model, and to achieve different emotions in the way in which each controller is positioned.

Texturing:The ‘texturing’ process is where we add colour and shading to the model. The geometry is ‘mapped’, as if you were skinning an animal, so that the surface is laid out on a flat, 2D image. This is called ‘UV Mapping’. Using Photoshop, colour information can be painted onto these flat images, which the computer then wraps back around the model.

Animation:i-nstein is animated by posing him in different positions over time. The animator sets ‘keys’ on the time-line, and the computer fills in the spaces between the key frames. Once the animation is complete, a low quality ‘playblast’ movie is created so that the director can sign off the animation before the character is lit and rendered.

Lighting:Once the animation of a shot is complete, the model is replaced with a higher resolution ‘mesh.’ This Mesh has a much higher ‘poly-count’ than the low quality ‘proxy mesh’ used for animation. The more polygons the software has to display, the slower the feedback, so this is why make the substitution at this stage. Once the lighter is happy with the general mood and look of this view a render can be made.

Rendering:A ‘render’ is a high quality, full resolution image of a particular frame of the animation. It brings all of the underlying elements together and outputs them as one single file. It can take a very long time for the computer to calculate. It took 60 seconds per frame to render i-nstein. There are 25 frames per second. To render 1 second of animation took 25 minutes. We produced about 9 minutes of animation, which took 225 hours to render. That’s almost9 and a half days of rendering!

To celebrate the launch of our summer family show for the summer, The Energy Show, we’ve teamed up with DK Books. You have the chance to win 4 tickets to the show and a stack of DK science books for kids – perfect to keep the family entertained throughout the holidays. See live experiments and explosions at the Science Museum and then learn more at home with this fantastic selection of books guaranteed to inspire curious minds. To enter, simply retweet our tweet on Twitter today before 16.30.

Here’s a sneak peek of the show!

A winner will be chosen at random and we’ll get in touch via Twitter. Good luck!

This summer, our IMAX theatre will be transformed into a steampunk world for ‘The Energy Show’. This theatre show for families explores the different forms of energy through some explosive experiments live on stage. It stars futuristic science students Annabella and Phil plus their lab assistant Bernard.

Science student Annabella. Credit: Janet Bird

These initial sketches from designer Janet Bird demonstrate the distinctly steampunk feel to The Energy Show.

Science student Phil. Credit: Janet Bird

Science Museum Live presents ‘The Energy Show’ at the Science Museum from 22 July – 31 August. You can find more information and tickets here.